Mission: ACH is the professional home for researchers, educators, practitioners, and patients committed to improving communication and relationships in healthcare. It is a home that provides opportunities for collaboration, support, and personal and professional development. ACH accomplishes this through: - Focusing on strengths, resources and needs of patients, clinicians and other professionals - both as unique individuals and in relationships to one another. - Developing skills that integrate biological, psychosocial and social domains. -Applying existing scholarship from multiple disciplines and developing new knowledge through research. - Promoting collaborative relationships between clinicians and patients, teachers and learners, and other involved professionals. - Incorporating core values of respect, empathy and genuineness in human relationships and the importance of self-awareness in all activities. Vision: A health care system where all patients, providers, and trainees feel valued, are treated equitably with respect, compassion, understanding, and are actively engaged in healthcare processes and decisions.